CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- GNS Healthcare (GNS), a leading precision medicine company, today announced a collaboration with Genentech, a member of the Roche Group to leverage GNS REFS™ (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation) causal machine learning and simulation platform to power the development of novel cancer therapies. The GNS technology turns large and diverse patient data streams into mechanistic computer models that reveal new pathways, novel targets, and diagnostic markers that may lead to new treatments that are better matched to individual patients.

The companies will collaborate to unlock knowledge from various data resources such as longitudinal electronic medical records (EMR records), next generation sequencing, and other 'omic data. The REFS technology uses a unique hypothesis-free approach that reverse-engineers causal biological and clinical models from large scale data streams, and then simulates interventions into those models to unravel the hidden drivers of cancer progression and drug response at the patient level. The discovery of these hidden drivers aims to enhance the ability to elucidate disease mechanisms, identify new targets, and stratify patient populations more accurately.

The alliance with GNS will provide Genentech with a powerful tool to find and validate potential new drug candidates and patient response markers using its growing volume of genomic and real-world data. The collaboration will first focus in oncology, where Genentech and GNS will use REFS to spot the underlying drivers of some of the most challenging diseases. The parties will investigate factors that impact efficacy of known therapies to generate insights that would inform research and development of next-generation cancer treatments.

"As the race to match patients with the right therapies continues, pharmaceutical companies are looking for innovative approaches to harness the unprecedented volume of data at their fingertips," said Iya Khalil, PhD, Chief Commercial Officer and Co-Founder of GNS Healthcare. "We are excited to partner with Genentech to apply GNS' breakthrough REFS™ causal machine learning and simulation platform to illuminate the underlying drivers of disease, stratify patients more accurately, and accelerate the development of novel therapies to treat cancer."